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Open University help for other institutions – drop in sessions
via GIPHY Several people (no, they’re not imaginary) have asked if the OU can make its expertise available to other institutions and educators as they engage in the online pivot. Of course, the immediacy of this shift is very different from designing a purposefully distance ed course with the luxury of time, so some of that expertise may not be appropriate. But some of it will. In addition, I think as the immediate implementation settles down people will start looking more medium to long term. Will the first semester next year be at a distance? Should we build in more distance ed options as part of our contingency planning? So…
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The robustness of distance ed
The online pivot is perhaps better considered as a pivot to distance ed, in that it is focused on delivery and support to students remote from campus. Online is how we will mostly realise it, but it is the distance that is the key factor. For many OU students, in terms of their study (although see below), the next few weeks are as near to business as normal as can be managed, when compared with the disruption students on face to face campuses will encounter. A long time ago (2007) I wrote an article called “The distance from isolation: Why communities are the logical conclusion in e-learning“. It argued that…
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Online Pivot – some Open University resources
As the pivot to online gathers apace, some colleagues have been discussing if we have useful resources at the Open University to help. Lots of other people are doing excellent work online, so I won’t try and collate everything that is out there but rather just focus on OU resources. While we do know a lot about distance & online learning, it’s important to recognise that what is happening now is quite different in nature. This is an emergency, swift response in switching classes to online, which is not the same as a carefully planned 5 year strategy. Our courses take a long time to develop and have the systems…
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The online pivot – student perspective
I posted a piece yesterday on what it will mean for educators and institutions to shift online as a result of COVID-19. And most of the articles and advice out there is aimed at educators, but we should bear in mind that it is an unfamiliar experience for many students too. One of the functions of face to face education is that it does a lot of the organising for a student: here is a timetable, here are locations to be in, here is where the resources can be found, etc. The physical structure of a campus is also a time and planning structure. When you move online (depending on…
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The COVID-19 online pivot
The outbreak of COVID-19 has seen many universities closing campuses and shifting learning online. It’s unprecedented and suddenly puts ed tech front and centre in a way it hasn’t been before. For those of us who have been doing online learning or distance ed for a while it can seem a bit irritating to have been seen as second class for so long and then suddenly deemed worthy of interest. So I tweeted over the weekend: It’s interesting seeing all the unis that disparaged distance ed as not proper suddenly being converted to the benefits of online education — Martin Weller (@mweller) March 7, 2020 It was kinda snarky, but…
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25 + 25
February is quite the month for 25 Year related events in the Weller household. For a start I celebrate 25 Years at the Open University. I joined in February 1995 on a 3 year lecturer contract, contributing to a course on Artificial Intelligence. At the time I had romantic visions of being a wanderer, an academic factotum, drifting from job to job as if precarity was cool. “I’ll only stay for 2 years, max” I confidently predicted. (Narrator: he stayed longer). It is also the month when my book 25 Years of Ed Tech comes out, this Friday in fact. My copies turned up today. That Bryan Mathers artwork really…
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Innovating Pedagogy 2020
Sorry I’m a bit late with this, I’ve been writing (more on that in the next post). The annual Innovating Pedagogy report is out. As ever this is written by my colleagues in IET, in collaboration with another institution. This time it was the super smart gang at the National Institute of Digital Learning at Dublin City University. The report continues with the aim of focusing on pedagogic developments that are related to technology, but crucially not focusing on the technology itself. This year’s innovations are: Artificial intelligence in education Posthumanist perspectives Learning through open data Engaging with ethics Social justice pedagogy Esports Learning from animations Multisensory learning Offline networked…
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Flexibility as a key benefit of open
I was at a posh event in London last week, hosted by the Open University (I even wore a tie, people!). It was launching an OU report “Bridging the Digital Divide” which looks at some of the skills gaps in employment and how education can address these. It’s a good report, which avoids the trite “60% of jobs haven’t been invented yet” type statement and builds on some solid evidence. As I chatted to Dames and Lords and fiddled with my tie, I reflected on that what is needed for many of these future employment scenarios is flexibility. This comes in various forms, and people often talk about personalisation but…
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IET, the OU and identity
This week we held a celebration to mark 50 years of the Institute of Educational Technology, and also to say goodbye to a colleague who has been immensely influential for me and IET, namely Patrick McAndrew. I’m going to work both of these together into a post about institutional memory, history and greek mythology. First up, some history of IET. I’ve blogged this before, but in being asked to do a short presentation (see below), I reflected on how educational technology was not some after thought or something that grew out of interest after a few years. It was embedded and deemed essential to the OU from the outset. The…
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Open Unis & Open Ed
Sometimes you read a post that encapsulates something you’ve been worrying at for a while. I had such an experience the other day when I read Tannis Morgan’s account of my own inaugural. In it, Tannis asks “But here’s the thing: how many people in the OER community in North America even know that Canada has three open universities, all of which were modelled after the UK Open University? And to what extent are open universities in Canada visibly inserting themselves into the broader open movement?” The first part of her question is something I have asked more broadly on this blog. Or moaned about anyway, that the open ed…
